


Iron Bars and Gilded Walls

by MakeTheMoon



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Choking Kink, M/M, Mild Angst, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, rated M for language and a couple throwaway lines about sexual activity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24242455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakeTheMoon/pseuds/MakeTheMoon
Summary: Jim takes in a grounding breath and thinks 'make it count'.In a universe where every being has a soul-mark, Jim Kirk's is... kind of weird. He shouldn't be surprised.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Spock
Comments: 13
Kudos: 450





	Iron Bars and Gilded Walls

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU even in that our birthmarks don’t exist as they do currently. Basically, I’ve pushed back the birthmark lore by a few centuries. There is blatant picking-and-choosing of the canon here as well. Some of this is exactly as we see it in the movie (2009), and some of it I completely made up, even if a particular scene WAS in the movie. This is about meeting your soulmate but also very vaguely about discovering your kinks? So.
> 
> Based on a lovely headcanon by sadtrek on Tumblr - theirs is way cuter.
> 
> The title is a reference to a poem called A Home Song by Henry van Dyke.

_I read within a poet’s book  
_ _A word that starred the page:  
"Stone walls do not a prison make,  
Nor iron bars a cage!" _

_Yes, that is true; and something more  
You’ll find, where’er you roam,  
That marble floors and gilded walls  
Can never make a home. _

_But every house where Love abides,  
And Friendship is a guest,  
Is surely home, and home-sweet-home:  
For there the heart can rest. _

- **A Home Song, Henry van Dyke**

************

  
Centuries ago, people called them birthmarks. Before that, they were simply called “unsightly”. Earth civilizations over the millennia had different beliefs - they were thought to be the unfulfilled wishes of the mother, or caused by the mother seeing something frightening during pregnancy, or even as specific as the mother touching a part of her body during a solar eclipse.

They call them nevi, now - an old Latin term, just distinct enough to differentiate between classic books and modern ones.

It seems silly, now; now that they know what they are. They learn in Modern Biohistory that the nevi have changed somewhere along their evolutionary way, but they’ve always been for the same purpose. They were never shaped like they are now, and they were always visible on a newborn. These days, some do appear at birth, but most get them in their mid-teens. Most people feel bad that beings from Earth’s past may never have known who their soulmate was because the marks were so abstract.

Jim’s mom always tells the story of how her and George first met. She tripped over a broken tile on the Kelvin, years before they both ended up working on her. George was an ensign, she was a cadet on a tour, and he caught her as she fell. This was sweet, of course. But the beginning of that story is always that when she turned sixteen a large handprint-shaped nevus appeared right on her boob, and she couldn’t tell her parents for _years_ ; not until it happened, anyway, and the handprint made a whole lot of sense. He had apologized profusely for the entirety of their walk back to the bridge, where he found the doctor and asked her to check out Winona’s toe. They hadn’t gotten each other’s contact information at the time, in the bustle of a starship, and it took two more years for them to meet back up on Earth.

And the rest is history, so they say.

********

Jim is nervous. By the time he hits 13, his anxiety has grown into what feels like a human sized steel ball that slowly rolls behind him wherever he goes. He’d always hoped he’d be one of the lucky ones to get the nevus early in life - that usually meant you’d meet your soulmate early. The sooner your nevus appeared, the sooner you’d find them, and the less time you’d have to agonize over it.

He told himself it would be fine, it would likely just be a small spot on his palm like most everyone else. His inability to believe that, however, lay solely with his mother, even though that wasn’t quite fair. It’s not like the nevi were hereditary; it’s not like just because his mom had an embarrassing one that he would too.

It was fortuitous, then, if not morbid in hindsight, when he moved to Tarsus. He figured it’d be good for him to spend a year in a home with somebody else’s family in which he didn’t have time to think about it at all, have more time to work and study.

He nearly starved to death, and the amount of trauma he’d ended up with tangled around his brain in those 12 short months sometimes made him laugh, eyes wet at the corners, usually at 2:00 a.m. As often as he cursed his lack of mark at his age, when shit really hit the fan on Tarsus all he could think was that he’d never meet them. He’d never know where his nevus would appear; he’d never feel whatever people felt when they touched that one spot on some random person in the street, or introducing themselves at a table full of men in suits, or catching a beautiful cadet on a starship. He admitted to his therapist and his therapist only that he stayed awake at night on that planet, 25 pounds too light and his skin three shades too grey, crying, grieving a soulmate he’d never meet.

********

Jim turns fifteen and manages to finish 10th and 11th grade in one school year, which means he’s got a long summer before 12th grade. He spends it alternating between working on the classic car in the garage and stressing over his nevus. He knows if he doesn’t have it by now, he’ll get it on his sixteenth birthday, which means he’ll have no idea when he’s going to meet this person.

So the summer comes and goes, and his steel ball grows. Christmas comes, and with it his grandparents (and aunts and uncles and cousins) who all separately ask him if he’s gotten his mark yet. They’re split right down the middle - some pity him, and some tell him ‘well that just means life’s going to be an even bigger adventure than you thought!’

His mom is gone for his sixteenth birthday, thank goodness. It might bother him any other year - she’s never missed a birthday yet. He suspects she’s giving him his privacy on the off chance he also wakes up with his equivalent of a handprint on a boob, but she insists it’s because they’re in the middle of a mission and nowhere near Earth.

He manages to get to sleep by 3am, and even then it’s just a snooze. He’s awake again at 3:45, and again at 4:38, and again at 5:50 - he decides to get up at that point.

He avoids all mirrors until the sun starts to rise. He showers, gets dressed, and eats in the dark. Nothing on his body feels different yet. People tell him it shouldn’t, they say it still feels like your skin, it’s just a different colour now, but he can’t help that throughout his life he’s assumed he’d be able to tell as soon as it happened.

The sun is over the horizon, and school is set to start in forty-five minutes, which means the bus will be here in ten. He has to at least check himself over before he leaves, because he can’t go to class not knowing, and god forbid some kid notices it before he himself does.

He flicks the light switch in the bathroom instead of calling them on because that feels right for this type of thing, irrational though it may be. He leans, with his head bowed, into the vanity over the sink, the edge leaving a deep, red valley across the heels of his hands. The faucet drips a few times and he remembers Frank saying he was going to fix that about three months ago - before Christmas, even. So now Jim is going to have to fix it because if it’s not fixed when Mom gets home she’ll be upset.

His fingernails tap a rhythm on the porcelain of the countertop as he sucks in a quick breath, closes his eyes, then pops them open when he looks up into the mirror - for a second he’s more distracted by how wide his mouth drops open than the nevus itself, but then he’s left staring at it, running his forefinger around the edges. They were right, it doesn’t feel any different; just skin. Just his skin.

It’s big and black. Or, not black, but dark anyway. Dark blue, or purple, maybe, in the bathroom light, and it is absolutely unmistakable.

It’s a handprint for sure. Not a pinpoint, not a fingerprint. An entire hand. Closed around his throat. There’s a clear thumbprint to the right of his Adam’s apple where the artery is jumping under the skin, and a full palm along the front of his neck, from chin to jugular notch, and four distinct fingers, one pressed to the other side of his Adam’s apple and three reaching up toward his left ear.

It’s _so_ obvious.

It’s impossible not to notice. And it’s impossible to cover. He couldn’t even wear an old-fashioned turtleneck if he had one, because the colour reaches up just under his chin. It’s too dark for makeup, or at least too dark for him to be able to quickly cover it right now, or before school every day.

All he can do right now is pull on a coat and hop on the bus. He’s the first one to be picked up, living all the way out in the country, so he sits at the very back hoping the least amount of people will see him. He sticks his nose into a textbook, which really isn’t that weird for him first thing in the morning, and makes sure his coat is zipped all the way up so he can tuck his chin into it. Maybe if he stays in this exact position for the whole day, no one will notice and he’ll have the rest of the night to figure it out.

He knew, he just _knew_ , that his nevus would be weird and obnoxious and embarrassing, just like his mom’s. He isn’t worried about his friends seeing it, they won’t care apart from it being a new thing for them to laugh about together. But there are other kids, kids whose parents are country club members or their older siblings are already CEO of some big corporation; kids who are going to be something, kids who will get through life hand-shake after hand-shake. Kids whose nevi are already apparent and have been for years, and even some who have already met their soulmate. Kids who think it’s sinful to have a nevus be anything other than palm-against-palm, or faint fingers on a forearm.

He sighs as he steps off the bus, resigns himself to whatever this day will throw at him. Standing out has never stopped him before.

********

The worst part about it, surprisingly, isn’t the kids who assume he’ll meet his soulmate by fighting. That makes sense. It’s what his own mind immediately went to as well; he was kind of known for it - smart and stupid; a fighter in every sense of the word. He’d be lying if he didn’t always have a small part of him that wanted his four knuckles to be black by his sixteenth birthday.

The worst part, the part that his mom will be so very disappointed about when she gets home, is the whispering. The whispering to keep it out of the teachers ears, lest they be suspended for inappropriate behavior and language.

Jim walks by a few girls on his way home a few days after he stopped caring and just wore whatever he wanted, and he didn’t catch all of it, but he caught enough. Then, as the weeks went on, they started speaking it louder and louder, and by the start of summer his entire graduating class - who, he reminds them constantly, are all older than him and most are of legal age when he himself is still 16 - have decided that Jim is into choking.

 _Into,_ into choking.

He knows, and Sam and Frank know, and unfortunately his mom also knows - he’s got a reputation. The reputation is completely unfounded, but that doesn’t stop teenagers from perpetuating it whenever they get the chance. At least his mom is more disappointed in the human race as a whole than Jim as an individual, when Sam tells her about it.

********

So, no, Jim doesn’t actually have sex with anyone until well after high school. And he takes a break again immediately, after this guy who’s bigger than him and more of a dick than him fits his hand around Jim’s throat a bit too tightly, for a bit too long, and the only thing Jim can think to do is knee him in the balls.

When he looks at the guy’s hands later, he thinks the fingers are too stubby, too fat, the nails too long, to fit correctly. He feels heat bloom in his chest, tries to tamp it down, but he can’t deny the relief that this isn’t the guy. This isn’t the one.

********

Jim gets choked again after that. More than once. He’s beginning to think his hand-on-the-throat nevus is like all those other people’s palm-on-palm ones. How’s he ever going to know?

He becomes a little bit obsessed with watching people’s hands. When he meets Bones, it takes 15 minutes for Bones to ask him if there’s something wrong with his hands and, when Jim says there’s not, to quit staring.

Classes go well. Pike’s proud of him, and Jim likes Pike a whole lot more than he ever liked Frank, or Kodos, even before all the... well. All of it. Pike at least believes in him, and he’s pretty sure Pike won’t start rationing his meals, and if he’s sometimes a little mean about it all, Jim figures he can’t really blame the man. He knows he’s a difficult case, even when he’s trying not to be. Maybe especially when he’s trying not to be.

He goads the Command track advisor into letting him pick up a seventh course each semester, which puts him right on track to graduate in three years. Pike rolls his eyes when Jim asks him to pay up, and he says, “I _dared_ you, I didn’t bet you. Get out.”

Jim grew up being told that a split second could change his whole life. It changed his mom’s, it ended his dad’s; it’s changed his life already, he’s sure, even though he doesn’t know what it would have been like otherwise. They’re these fleeting moments, perceived in a different way by everyone and often enough misunderstood because everyone’s on autopilot, with no one there to tell you, ‘ _make it count.’_

His elation at beating the Kobayashi Maru is quickly doused by its creator accusing him of cheating, and then, _very_ quickly, the threat of the destruction of the world. As he’s standing there behind his little podium, looking sideways at the straight-backed Vulcan, Admiral Barnett is interrupted in person, which never happens, and Jim feels a frisson pass through him, head to toe, as Barnett looks him in the eye, then the Vulcan, and ends the hearing.

The Academy is thrown into chaos, and later he watches Bones walk away towards the shuttle to the Enterprise, and he feels a bit silly that he thought it’d have anything to do with him, that the chills were from more than just the air-con in a large, drafty room. When Bones catches back up with him and hauls him around the corner, Jim grins and pulls Bones’ hands up in front of his face, squints at them, and says, “are you _sure_ you don’t have a nevus here somewhere?” and then Bones stabs him in the neck.

********

He’s freezing. He’s never been this cold, and fuck that guy for sending him in a pod onto a frozen wasteland of a planet with some flimsy boots and a parka. Not even a sweater, or thermals. Fuck that guy.

The creatures that live on planets like this are horrifying, and he knows this because he pays attention, and he’s smart, and he knows nearly every habitable planet in the Alpha quadrant. If he makes it off this planet alive, he’s going to kill that fucking Vulcan.

His chances of getting off this planet alive are slim to none.

In the course of the next 45 minutes, he learns: that he can _almost_ outrun whatever was just chasing him; that there are multiple universes, with multiple Hims and at least one in which he knew his dad; what a mind-meld is; that this Vulcan is an asshole in every universe.

********

NCC-1701 is the most beautiful ship in the world. She was built with love and care in her cradle in Riverside, she had the best architects designing her, and the best engineers in the universe working on her from the inside out.

Jim wants to be able to appreciate her more, but as he’s running through her corridors and in and out of her lifts, he doesn’t have the luxury. Just this feeling that he should slow down and touch her walls, open every door simply to see what’s inside, listen for all her sighs and grumbles. It's fleeting, but overpowering. 

The turbolifts _could_ be a little more “turbo”, Jim thinks. Scotty feels the same by the looks of it, squishing his feet in his boots and flicking a pinky in his ear, looking as impatient as Jim feels. Jim can’t help but smirk, and at least has the presence of mind to do it on the side that Scotty can’t see. Maybe between them, they’d be able to enhance this turbolift, get the crew to the bridge faster for their shifts everyday. One extra moment to enjoy their coffee in their quarters.

It actually _dings_ when it reaches the bridge.

It hurts enough, not having a dad. Or, having a dad, but only knowing him through others, only knowing the good parts of him. No one speaks ill of the dead, you know.

It’s another thing entirely to know that someone has just lost their mother, the mother who loved them for 25 short years. Jim hates himself. He hates alternate universe Spock, and he hates himself, and he hates Nero, and he hates his dad, and he lets it all build up in him until he’s yelling in the face of a Vulcan who is scientifically, anatomically, much stronger than he is.

Jim takes a moment between breaths to size him up. Part intimidation, part trying to figure out if he could take him. A quick flick over this guys body, head to toe and back again. Jim’s stepped up close enough that it’s a full head tilt, false bravado, pointed.

Then through the haze of adrenaline it hits him like a tonne of bricks - his hands. One is curled into a tight fist at his side, the other gripping the railing, but there, in the middle of the fist, is a dark blue, maybe purple splotch. More than a splotch - it looks like it spans his entire palm, thumb to pinky, as far as Jim can see around the curled fingers.

Seconds feel like minutes and he still doesn’t have enough time to think about it, because that fist comes flying directly at his face. He dodges and swings to hurt, aims for his side, remembers about Vulcan hearts and holds back just enough not to do real damage. He knows what it feels like to be hit in the middle of the chest and it sucks, and while he wants this guy to be angry and throw punches, he has no desire to actually have anyone get injured. Either way, he just misses. 

He catches Scotty's eye when he trips over the chair, with his hand frozen in mid air like he was about to try to put a stop to the yelling, until it became physical. Jim wills him to stay out of it. They can only afford for this to go one way. 

A security officer grabs Jim under the arms and tries to pull him back and away, so Jim steps on his toes, leaps forward, ends up bent over the navigation console. It takes him less than a second to roll over and think about swinging again, and then-

It does feel like something. It feels like choking, it feels like the air in his lungs is unable to escape, it feels like the blood in his veins is unable to flow to his brain. It feels like burning, panic, pain.

Euphoria.

An older Vulcan says his name, once, “Spock,” firm but unaffected, just about when Jim’s vision is going white.

Spock's fingers twitch, barely easing his grip, and Jim wishes he could open his eyes and see the look on his face, see if he’s feeling any or all of the things Jim is feeling, but he’s tired and on his way to unconsciousness. He sucks air in as soon as the fingers leave his skin and he rubs at his own neck with both hands, gasping, a horrible, gravelly sound. Doesn’t feel like he’ll ever have enough oxygen in his lungs again. The bridge is silent aside from him.

Bones listens as Spock declares himself unfit for duty, Uhura shuffles to go after him and decides against it, and Scotty finally lowers his hand. Every security officer is staring at Jim with their phasers trained on his torso. It’s unpleasant.

The console holds most of his weight until he gets the feeling back in his legs, adrenaline masking any sort of pain he might have had, and he finally stands again when the lift doors close on Spock. Bones is at his side with a medical tricorder whirring around his head in seconds and there’s something about the fact that he doesn’t say a word that’s more eerie than Jim would like to admit.

********

Later - it feels like a century - in medbay, with the Enterprise limping home and every soul on the ship exhausted, he has time to think about it. His knee is bandaged, and his broken finger fixed, and Bones has told him to sit still for a few hours, let the pain meds kick in and take it easy. He doesn’t do well being idle, but he listens. Bones assures him there’s no permanent damage anywhere in or around his neck even though Jim’s pretty sure a major artery must have been crushed with the size of the bruise he has - or, thinks he has, considering it would be the same dark blue and purple as the skin there anyway.

He doesn’t miss the knowing looks from the nurses and the other doctor that are nearby. How often do they get a patient in their medbay with an injury exactly the size and shape of their nevus?

Probably not often.

Probably never.

They’ve got a couple days before they get to Earth and there are a million thoughts running through his brain simultaneously, and a particular hand-shaped one he pushes aside every time it pops up. It’s a thought for another time, but his brain seems to think it’s pertinent. He’s got half a mind to ask Bones for a mild sedative if he didn’t think it’d get him knocked out cold for hours and removed from the Academy.

He also adamantly ignores that when he thinks about it, thinks about the fingers around his throat, fitting right onto those fingerprints there, that he might have been a bit hard. Just. He’ll ignore it, because it doesn’t mean anything because adrenaline does strange things to a body, he knows this. His best friend is a doctor.

When he’s free to go, being told to head to an empty room with a bed and not much else, he takes the walk he so desperately wanted as he was running through the corridors. He takes a look around, avoids the damaged areas both out of respect for the ship and her engineers, and also fear of getting in trouble. He’s aware that he’s currently sitting on a precipice, one wrong move and it could all be taken away, but a few good moves and he may be able to make this work.

He’s got to call his mom, though she’ll know he’s still alive by now. It feels important, anyway.

He passes a rec room door then turns on his heel and quietly peeks in. There are large windows all along the back wall, floor to ceiling, a VR playing field in one corner, a bar in another. He doesn’t quite realise he’s smiling until it hurts his throat, forcing a cough and losing his breath, startling the sole person in there, who’s slumped on the couch looking out the window.

Spock would probably never admit that he jumped, but he does, and something warm tugs at Jim’s heart. His head swivels around the back of the couch he’s resting on, meets Jim’s eyes and glances away again, slumping lower until he looks decidedly unVulcan.

Jim quietly sits a few feet away, careful with his recently fixed broken finger and keeping his knee straighter than he’d like. He can see the swelling through his pants. It’s going to suck for a long time.

“I wish to-”

“Look, I’m sorry-”

If he had to, he’d swear that Spock’s lips lift a little at the corners. He’d swear it. Maybe it’s more of a feeling than a visual, but there’s something in his face like amusement.

“Go ahead,” Jim says. “Sir.”

Spock clears his throat and starts again, “I wish to apologise and thank you for the work you’ve done.” He’s not looking at Jim, just a spot on the floor in front of him.

Jim laughs, touches his neck when the skin pulls, and says, “Really? Apologise and thank me? I didn’t know Vulcans could be absolutely insane. Spock-” he cuts himself off, corrects himself, “Sir, I’m sorry. I fully understand that what I said and did today is unacceptable.” 

“You saved the ship, Jim. Aside from any personal loss I may be feeling, you were the one who jumped onto an alien drill in the middle of the atmosphere of a planet you’ve never been to in order to save millions of people you do not know. And then to do that again, to risk your life with me aboard the Narada…”

Jim lets him trail off; he gets it. He considers his dad, considers Spock’s father and mother, as he watches the constellations shift, morph into new ones, and new ones again as they make their way back home. Changing without fanfare or drama, merely existing as they are and unaware that the perception of them differs moment to moment.

Jim takes in a grounding breath, thinks _make it count_ , and says, “Can I tell you something weird?”

Spock glances back, then out the window again, and says, “I suppose.”

Another grounding breath. “I felt more at home here, today, than I ever did on Earth.” He huffs out a breath and shakes his head at himself, then continues, “Actually that sounded even weirder when I said it out loud than it did in my head, and believe me, that’s saying something.”

Spock had turned toward him more fully, is looking him in the eye which is a bit much for right now, Jim thinks, and says, “I find the human body’s mechanism of blushing when the person has done something they deem embarrassing to be fascinating,” and it’s like he knows, because he doesn’t stop looking right at Jim. “However,” he says, pauses, “It would seem that I agree with you.” He says it softly like he’s afraid anyone will hear him, even Jim.

Jim still doesn’t know if Spock has clocked that their nevi match perfectly. Spock was in a grief-fueled rage when he put his hands on Jim, and he’s not sure if Spock was seeing anything but red in that moment.

“Hey, maybe we’ll end up on a ship together some time. I think we make a pretty good team when we, uh, get past our differences?”

Spock does a thing with his face that makes it clear he’s rolling his eyes without rolling his eyes, which delights Jim to his core, so he reaches across and taps the outside of Spock’s thigh with the back of his hand, grinning wide, throwing in an eyebrow waggle while he’s at it.

“If you aren’t careful, I may be forced to choke you again,” Spock says, straight as an arrow, zero emotion, a picture perfect Vulcan. His fingers twitch, though, Jim knows. Jim knows because he’s watching them.

That same feeling of frisson runs through him, causing a full-bodied shudder that he dampens by shifting where he sits. Clears his throat. Rubs a circle into the cushion with the same hand he tapped Spock with.

Jim wants to say _is that a promise?_ because it’s what he’d say to anyone else in this situation to break the tension. He settles for, “I find it pretty difficult to be careful, honestly,” and it ends up far breathier than he intended, far from his usual bold declarations. It feels a little like putting all his cards on the table, actually, and he has no idea how a Vulcan would respond to an obvious come-on. Or if they’d even see it as one. Do Vulcans have pick-up lines? Do Vulcans _flirt_? Do they understand double entendre?

For a second, less than, Spock’s mouth lifts up into a full smile and back down again, schooling his severe features back into their neutral, serious expression.

He catches Jim’s gaze and holds it, and says, “Of that, Jim, I have no doubt.”

Jim looks back out the window and recognises no patterns, no constellations, and maybe it does feel like a promise after all.


End file.
